Latest update May 13th, 2024 12:59 AM
Apr 08, 2013 Letters
Dear Editor,
Hydar Ally would be left to his own mutterings if he was nothing but a fringe PPP player. However, this is a man who is the Deputy Permanent Secretary in the Office of the President where he earns a cool $550,064 every month, which is more than the Clerk of the Trinidad and Tobago Senate and Deputy Secretary to the T&T Cabinet. He is a prominent member of a party (PPP) equally responsible with the PNC for the racial apartheid in this country. Intellectual fabrications and revisions from the Hydar Allys must be countered and vehemently so. Ally’s diatribe titled “Race relations in Guyana” (KN, March 21, 2013) is more shoddy revisionist posturing from the PPP. Like many of his ilk, Ally avoids candid and honest addressing of the deep-seated racial problems of this country, choosing to exercise intellectual derangement rather than truth. He cunningly concludes that because there is some social intermixing of the races, Guyana is not an ethnically polarized nation or that “race has never been a serious problem in Guyana”. This is hogwash. Particularly so when the antics of the PPP in the last elections raised the racial temperature in this nation to bitter heights. Race has always been a problem in Guyana. The Indian-African race conflict defines our landscape because these two groups collectively represented 73.65% of the entire population, as per the 2002 census, and they continue to tussle in herculean fashion along racial lines.
Ally tried to hoodwink us by attempting to conflate some social mixing among the races to mean significant social mixing, non-superficial or deep social mixing or frequent or regular social contact when there are many issues with sub-issues involved here. Any study of Guyana in the past 20 years of PPP rule would unequivocally indicate social interaction/contact between Indians and Africans is the lowest for all inter-racial social interactions among different ethnicities in Guyana and this relates to not only proportional volume but also intensity and frequency. These two groups (Indians and Africans) continue to regard each other with uneasiness and this continues to be manifested socially. No wonder the PNC and PPP could continue with these boorish antics and still retain significant electoral support. That same study would reveal inter-racial social interactions and mixing has increased among non-Indian and non-African ethnicities and further, between Indians and Africans and other ethnicities (Amerindians and Mixed predominantly) but not with each other.
For the majority of Indians and Africans, social mixing or even meaningful relationships has not become anything more than a minority exercise. If one is to properly measure the Mixed Race population, the strength of its increase since 1980 when it was 11.16% of the entire population to 2002 when it was 16.73% most likely lies not in more African-Indian miscegenation, marriages and relationships (the ultimate test of inter-racial contact) but in greater miscegenation among non-African and non-Indian ethnicities and also between Indians and Africans with other racial groups (Mixed and Amerindian) but not with each other. The striking evidence would reveal a continuing Indian-African social divide that continues to strafe this country. The social interaction argument usually posited by the deniers, revisionists and biased polemicists is a fraudulent one that attempts to portray a superficial level of social interaction as completely and utterly definitive of what they and only they see as the lack of racial tension, ethnic polarity or the existence of a race problem. This is insidious reasoning. This approach fails to contemplate something fundamental to the exegesis of the race problem in Guyana; power. The race problem in Guyana is most pervasive and becomes most ugly when it comes to the fight for power. We all know that real power in Guyana’s failed system is political. Hydar Ally and his cohorts refuse to examine this angle because it is the filthy underbelly of racism and the escalation of ethno-politics in Guyana and we saw it just as recently as the 2011 election. In the heat of election season, we get ethnic entrepreneurs whipping up their ethnic constituencies into a frenzy while pillorying the other ethnic group for political gain. This is where racism destroys this country every five years and we never recover from it. Coupled with the ethno-biased handouts that occur when one race’s political group gains power, this further raises the racial temperature in the country. When limited resources are so callously stolen and corrupted away to a particular ethnic group, it deepens racial resentment.
To try to bury this disturbing reality of political racism and race politics in Guyana behind the social synergy curtain is Frankenstein-like deceit. We have a rural sprawl of ethnic garrisons living side by side but never mixing. Even in the cities, these ethnic enclaves exist. 90% of the entire population lives along a habitable coast of 250 kms. Of that number, 498,005 are Africans and Indians living along that same 250 km stretch of coast in a population density that is 1992 per square km. Yet they hardly interact or mix meaningfully. This dynamic suits the rabble-rousers at Freedom House and Congress Place but it absolutely devastates this country’s economic potential. The PNC did nothing and now the PPP has done absolutely nothing to right race relations in this country. We have a big bad bloody race problem in Guyana. It is serious. It is killing us and our potential as a nation every single day. Finally, while Cheddi Jagan may not have been a racist personally, he certainly had no problem playing the race card for political gain. Nothing will change this fact. The PPP is evidence of this truth. Further, the PPP destabilized itself in the sixties just as much as it was undermined. It was its own biggest enemy. Its hardheadedness, lack of tact, intractability and poor political acumen caused it to squander power from 1957 to 1964 even when it knew it could not win a PR election. Cheddi Jagan and his communist claptrap victimized the PPP and its supporters by putting them at the mercy of the real powers in Guyana who held the reins to do what they wanted to do; the West. Enough of this victimhood eulogy. How long will the PPP acolytes like Hydar Ally tell Indians they are eternal victims of the PNC without admitting to the gross miscalculations, errors and pitfalls the PPP made to help to create the PNC dictatorship? Forbes Burnham outsmarted and outplayed Cheddi Jagan. Cheddi Jagan helped to deliver Burnham. And that is the truth.
M. Maxwell
Listen how to run an oil country
May 13, 2024
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